Auction house Sotheby's has recently revealed that an original 1976 Apple 1 motherboard has been auctioned for $374,500 at a New York event; at which a four-page handwritten Atari memo from Steve Jobs fetched $27,500.

The sales of the rare functioning computer and the memo have set a new record for the auction house which had originally expected that the motherboard will go for a price of between $120,000 and $180,000; and the memo will sell for between $10,000 and $15,000.

The Apple 1 computer was one of the nearly 200 hand-built systems which were created by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. The machines were originally sold for $666.66 - or £426 - as a fully assembled circuit board.

Hardly about 50 of those Apple 1 computers are still believed to be in existence; and the model sold at the auction is one of the very few which are still in working condition.

The memo auctioned by Sotheby's was written by the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs during his days at Atari. In the four-page memo, Jobs - who was barely 19 years old when he wrote the note in 1974 - had detailed the mechanism for improving Atari's arcade football game World Cup. The pages included circuit drawings and diagrams which showed how the `fun' element could be enhanced for the players of the paddle-based game.